Retirement is the law, not choice for Common Pleas Judge David W. Fais

Friday

Feb 6, 2015 at 12:01 AMFeb 6, 2015 at 10:34 AM

If not for a state law that prohibits a judge from beginning a term after turning 70, David W. Fais would have been on the ballot last November, seeking another six years on Franklin County Common Pleas Court. Instead, he will enter retirement today after a 26-year career in which he handled some of the county's highest-profile cases.

John Futty, The Columbus Dispatch

If not for a state law that prohibits a judge from beginning a term after turning 70, David W. Fais would have been on the ballot last November, seeking another six years on Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

Instead, he will enter retirement today after a 26-year career in which he handled some of the county's highest-profile cases.

The 71-year-old Republican will make himself available as a visiting judge, a status that has no age restriction.

"It doesn't seem to make sense to me that if you can serve as a visiting judge into your 70s and beyond - and people are doing it regularly - that he or she cannot serve as an elected judge," Fais said.

"My health is good, my energy level is good, my desire is strong, and I would have run again."

Among those who are critical of the age restriction for judges is criminal-defense attorney Nancy Wonnell, who has known Fais since before he became a judge.

"He's on top of his game," she said. "There is no reason for him to be forced to retire."

Few obstacles have deterred Fais, who beat throat cancer more than 20 years ago and speaks with a raspy voice from surgery that saved his life but took his vocal cords.

"I didn't know if I ever would return to this bench," Fais recalled. "I put it in the hands of the man up above. It forever changed my life."

Ron Janes, a Columbus lawyer who graduated from Ohio Northern University's law school with Fais, said the ordeal made Fais "an even better judge."

"I think when you have a life-changing medical condition, you get a wake-up call, and it puts everything else into perspective," Janes said.

Fais said the experience made him more compassionate. But it didn't stop him from imposing the death penalty twice when it was recommended by juries.

The most memorable of those cases, he said, was that of Jerry Hessler, who went on a shooting rampage, killing a husband and wife and their 5-month-old daughter on the North Side and a 64-year-old man in Worthington on Nov. 19, 1995. The case attracted so much attention that the jury's verdict in October 1996 was carried live on local TV.

"That is one trial that I will live with forever," Fais said.

He also imposed the death penalty in 2002 on Jonathan D. Monroe, who tortured and killed two women in 1998.

Hessler died of a heart attack in prison in 2003. Monroe remains on Death Row.

Sentencing is the most difficult part of the job, Fais said, and contemplating the death penalty placed an awesome weight on his shoulders.

"You don't sleep the night before," he said. "I never second-guessed myself, but in this profession, you don't have a higher responsibility than that."

Fais demonstrated his compassion this week when, in one of his final acts, he terminated probation two months early for former Ohio State University football star Maurice Clarett and congratulated him for turning his life around.

Clarett, convicted of robbery and weapons charges in 2006, generated as much media attention as any other case Fais handled in recent years, he said.

Another high-profile case was that of Matthew Cordle, whose video confession and apology for killing a man in a drunken-driving crash became a YouTube sensation in 2013.

"I sincerely believe his statements were genuine, that he regrets that night," said Fais, who sentenced Cordle to 6 1/2 years in prison.

What sets Fais apart as a judge, defense attorney Jeremy Dodgion said, is his intense curiosity about others.

"When you meet him, he wants to know where you came from, where you went to school, what your parents did," Dodgion said.

"He's always inquisitive about those who appear in his courtroom. He's genuinely curious about what brought people to the point in their life where they're in front of him. He's extremely empathetic."

Dodgion described the judge as "very humble, very private. He doesn't talk about his accomplishments."

Fais and his wife of 50 years, Sandy, have lived in the same Grandview Heights home for 40 years and raised both of their children there. He grew up in Grandview and earned a bachelor's degree at Otterbein College.

After law school, he worked as an assistant Columbus city attorney and an assistant county prosecutor and in private practice before seeking a judgeship.

His father, G.W. Fais, was a Franklin County judge for 19 years, first in Municipal Court and then Common Pleas. He retired in 1989.

Fais said his father "was an influence, but not an overwhelming influence," in his decision to run for a spot on the bench in 1988. He won that race and was re-elected four times.

His father died in November 1991. Two weeks later, Fais, a nonsmoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer. Radiation treatments appeared to eliminate the tumor, but it returned in the summer of 1993.

That October, he went to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for a supracricoid laryngectomy, a procedure in which a surgeon removed the vocal cords but left the arytenoids - cartilage that allowed him to regain his ability to speak.

He was in the hospital for nearly five weeks and off the bench for four months, returning with a small microphone on his robe to amplify his voice.

"But for that doctor being able to perform that surgery, I wouldn't have sat on that bench for 26 years. I can tell you that," Fais said.

"Every day that I sit on that bench and put that microphone on my robe, I think about that. It makes you think about things that you may have taken for granted."

jfutty@dispatch.com

@johnfutty

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